A look at WordPress 3.0’s default theme, Twentyten

A lot of features are discussed for the new default theme for WordPress version 3. I’m using a theme base which I rolled together over the years, based off of Classic (of all things!). It’s a quick and easy and customizable way for me to deploy a site and focus on the CSS, as I believe in my document structure. My aversion to other people’s code comes with its drawback: I totally missed the bus when it came and picked up the is_singular conditional function, and I also consider leading post images as used by so many bloggers to be distracting and irrelevant, but that’s me.

A lot of the focus on Twentyten is on new features such as WooThemes navigation (which is available for all, if you know what you’re doing). Aaron Brazell recommends child-theming Twentyten, which is not a bad idea, but I think there is room for improvement in the final. I’m writing this because it’s an Alpha version, and there’s still time for someone with the PHP knowhow to do this.

Twentyten uses conditional logic in loop.php that references Category names such as Asides and Gallery. Not a bad idea, except the installation does not populate those Categories. I’m certain that there can be safeguards to overwriting existing categories when this happens for an upgrade, but if you’re going to take dibs on category names, at least populate those names or have a friendly (yellow) reminder up top that tells users “in order to make the most out of your theme, please create categories with the following names: Asides, Category, YourMomsKnickers.”
This is what I talk about when I discuss “thoughtful theming” in casual conversation.

I don’t know how to commit these suggestions or if it will even be an idea well-received, but it’s definitely worth thinking about.